Yesterday I posted a long look at the NYR forwards' matchups and results, from a unique competition visualization tool created by some nobody (@petbugs13). Today is NYR defensemen day!

I'll repost the "key" PB provided - you'll want to keep this picture handy so you can review it when looking at the rest of this post.

click to enlarge

Remember: when looking at the results, in general, we want to see a player producing positive results on the y-axis. In those cases, the player is performing better than we would expect against that opponent or that match-up.

Yesterday's post reviewed the 2017 season-to-date results for NYR forwards, and today we'll look at the NYR defensemen results. All data is 5v5, score and venue adjusted from NaturalStatTrick. As with yesterday, here are the summaries.

Looking at how the NYR defensemen have matched up against opposition forwards, here are some interesting things:

Not really surprising that McDonagh and Holden have matched up the most, since that's clearly Vigneault's preferred shut-down pair. Smith "matching" up against the "better" quality forwards by shot differential is probably an anomaly due to the lesser amount of time he's played.

Looking at performance, there's a lot more blue (negative) here, than green (positive). Again this means that these NYR defensemen are generally underperforming their expected results against the opposition forwards.

McDonagh is the only defensemen who doesn't show any real signs of underperformance.

Kampfer's in a world of his own, as you'll see below.

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday: We see a fair amount of players (Hayes, for example), underperforming against "worse" quality (negative shot differential) opposition, and exceeding expectations against "better" quality (positive shot differential) opposition. This is the reverse of the norm - players tend to perform better against the lesser opposition. Maybe there is a reason for these odd results, or maybe (and this is my instinct), this is just an "early season" "small sample" result. We'll see if this holds up as the season continues.

Looking at how the NYR defensemen have matched up against opposition defensemen now. I would put even less value on this - I don't recall any evidence that coaches focus their defensive utilization on the other team's defensemen - so I wonder if this is mostly circumstance. But, regardless of the matchups, overall, the NYR defensemen have been terrible against the other team's defensemen. Staal, Smith, Kampfer and Skjei all underperforming, to various degrees.

The specific player details follow.

Marc Staal vs Opposition Forwards

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Matchups: Very neutral - Staal has not been particularly sheltered or matched against opposition forwards.

Performance vs Matchups: Skjei has basically been slightly negative against all opposition defensemen.

Skjei Summary: Skjei has slightly underperformed as a whole against the opposition defensemen.

So what difference does it make?

I take even less from these results than I did from the NYR forwards' results. It is still early in the season, and we've seen some unexpected performances from Smith, Holden, and maybe even Staal. But how about that Kampfer, huh?